Sexism in Media

Since the beginning of history, sexism has always been a prominent barrier between sexes. The notion that women are not on the same level as men has always been in existence. We can also see on the Holy Scriptures that sexism is present and never been changed through the years. Despite of the contemporary times that we have today, Sexism is still debatable, that even professionals that are involve in providing information became sexist. Media is very influential in the world. We are bombarded with all kinds of media. Adults and even children are into media because it is the number one source of information, entertainment, and current events. Newspaper is one of the primary sources in current news events. Not all people can access television, radio and internet but newspaper is everywhere. Everyone reads it, so this study will determine the degree of sexism on newspapers and identify what newspapers in Davao city are more frequent in using sexism terms.

Statement of the problem

1. How frequent sexism terms are being used on newspaper editorials?

2. What newspaper publisher is more frequent in using sexism terms?

Linguistic sexism

Sexism is a widely debated area included in the subject of gender and language. As already stated, a definition used within this study is Vetterling-Braggins (1981 cited in Mills 1995:83): “a statement is sexist if it contributes, promotes or exploits an unfair or irrelevant or impertinent distinction between the sexes”. Both genders are included in this definition. However, Cameron (1992:100) suggests that it is women who are suffering from sexist structures in language. Some linguistic sexism is evident, such as the use of “whore” or other words that describe women negatively. However, linguistic sexism also concerns language use that in different ways diminishes women and makes them invisible (Weatherall 2002:76). Feminists state that English is a language with sexist structures (Holmes 2008:318). The subject of sex and gender is in itself an interesting area that will only briefly be mentioned in this thesis. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2010) describes sex as the biological state of being either female or male and gender as the socially categorisation of females and males. The term gender will be used henceforth. Also worth pointing out briefly in connection to this type of study is that the system of